iSun Investigation: The high cost of skipping school

Dec. 15, 2013

Indio Police Department truancy officer Jesus Gutierrez, second from right, and school officer Renee Mendez talk with a high school student for being late to school at the Riverside Regional Learning Center in Indio. / Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

Written by

Brett Kelman

The Desert Sun

Indio Police Department truancy officer Jesus Gutierrez writes a citation to a high school student Dec. 3 for not being on time to school. / Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

TRUANCY VERSUS CHRONICALLY ABSENT

• Truancy: A student is truant if he or she is absent or tardy by more than 30 minutes without a valid excuse at least three times during a single school year. Valid excuses include illness, doctor’s appointments or personal reasons justified by a parent or guardian. • Chronic absence: A student is chronically absent if they miss at least 10 percent of the school year, regardless of whether their absences are excused or not. In a 180-day school year, that’s 18 days of school. Source: California Office of the Attorney General

BY THE NUMBERS

8,000 or 12%

Number of Coachella Valley students that were chronically absent during the first quarter of this school year. One-third

Fraction of Coachella Valley students declared truant five years in a row Up to $20 million

Annual funding that is lost by desert schools due to student absences. 12 percent

Drop in property crimes in Indio after police began combating truancy.

more online at www.mydesert.com/education

Dig through the truancy numbers online. Our searchable map and database correlates truancy rates and test scores for schools throughout the valley.

Indio Police Department truancy officer Jesus Gutierrez walks with two students he found that were not on time to school at the Riverside Regional Learning Center in Indio on Dec. 3. / Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

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As soon as she was old enough to go to school, Tiffany Merritt began to refuse.

She would refuse to get out of the bed, refuse to get dressed, refuse to go to kindergarten. Sometimes, her mother Alicia Merritt, a working parent of four, had no choice but to carry her daughter into the classroom. Some days, it just wasn’t worth the fight, so the stubborn child would get her way, skipping school to stay home with her grandmother.

But when the girl grew into a defiant teenager, her mother lost what little control she had. Tiffany was habitually truant by middle school, blowing off classes on a whim. During her freshman year at West Shores High in Salton City, she recorded more than 80 absences. By 10th grade, she was failing every class. The rebellious teen seemed fated to follow her mother, who dropped out of school in the eighth grade, and her older brother, who dropped out on his 18th birthday.

“I couldn’t get her out of bed. I couldn’t get her to get dressed,” Alicia Merritt said. “By then, she was way too big to be putting in the shower and dressing, trying to battle by myself. So a lot of days it was just — what do I do? There wasn’t very much you can do.”

When Tiffany missed elementary lessons on reading, writing and counting she set a precedent that would haunt her as an adult.

As early as elementary school, frequent absences significantly increase the likelihood that students will struggle in subsequent years on standardized tests, drop out of high school or be charged with a juvenile crime. Absences siphon millions of dollars from cash-strapped schools, and ultimately cost the state of California billions to support adults who end up living in poverty or serving time.

Over the past three months, The Desert Sun investigated the widespread impacts of absenteeism and truancy in the Coachella Valley, plotting patterns in behavior by students like Tiffany against performance outcomes. To understand the true cost of an empty desk, the newspaper studied local absenteeism data, state-truancy rates, test scores, school-budget figures and criminal statistics.

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To better understand the statistical evidence, all three Coachella Valley school districts agreed to provide The Desert Sun with actual examples of chronic absenteeism while protecting the identities and schools of the students. In one case, a family included in our analysis agreed to be interviewed so we could provide a fuller assessment of the causes and consequences of skipping school.

Among The Desert Sun’s findings:

• In all three desert school districts, schools with higher truancy rates generally score lower on standardized tests, leading to lower Academic Performance Index (API) ratings. In middle and high schools, higher levels of truancy equate to higher dropout rates. Coachella Valley schools with truancy rates of 10 percent or less average API scores that are at least 60 points higher than schools where a majority of kids are truant.

• Because school districts are funded based on their average daily attendance, student absences cost Coachella Valley schools as much as $20 million in annual funding. At the middle and high school level, truancy is more concentrated in impoverished areas, where school funding is even more critical.

• High levels of truancy contribute to a rise in property crimes, particularly daytime burglaries. For instance, police in Indio have begun to preempt crime by tackling truancy instead of chasing criminals, resulting in an overall drop in property crimes.

• One-third of Coachella Valley public school students were truant between the 2007-2008 school year and the 2011-2012 school year. During the same five-year period, the statewide truancy average was 27 percent. Riverside County averaged 32 percent. A student is truant if they have three or more unexcused absences in a single school year.

• When the desert data are broken down by district, it becomes clear that schools in Coachella Valley Unified and Desert Sands Unified have recorded an above average level of truancy, 36 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Palm Springs Unified saw a more average truancy rate, 26 percent, but a higher number of students with lengthier or more frequent absences.

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Students who miss at least one-tenth of school days are considered “chronically absent,” a legal designation separate from truancy. Chronic absenteeism, education experts say, should be more prominently studied.

During the first quarter of this school year, more than 8,000 students, or 12 percent of all students, were chronically absent from Coachella Valley public schools. Truancy only measures unexcused absences, while chronic absenteeism factors in all absences, regardless of the reason.

For example, in Desert Hot Springs, two siblings were deemed chronically absent after they each missed five days of class during the first quarter of the school year to undergo long-overdue dental work. In Cathedral City, a teenager with a violent childhood missed another five days of class because of emerging mental health issues.

In Indio, a third-grader missed 12 days of school after his mother was deported to Mexico. The boy is now in the custody of his grandmother, who keeps him home for even minor complaints of a tummy ache.

And in Bermuda Dunes, a high school senior remains woefully behind his classmates, unable to graduate due to his lack of credits. His absences began in kindergarten, and he has missed a little more school each year due to fear of bullies, chronic illness and troubles at home, eventually missing more than half his classes this year.

Some of these are absences are excused and some aren’t.

“It doesn’t matter how exemplary or robust or rigorous or engaging our academic programs are if students aren’t there to participate,” said Gary Rutherford, superintendent of the Desert Sands Unified School District.

Chronic absenteeism is a statewide epidemic that threatens “our economy, our safety, and our children,” concluded Kamala Harris, attorney general of California, in a report released in September. As schools across the state were resuming class, Harris released a 158-page report that studied a sampling of hundreds of schools in more than 30 different districts.

The AG’s report didn’t examine any schools from the Coachella Valley, so The Desert Sun launched its own investigation of absenteeism.

Although the AG’s report said that chronic absenteeism has risen to “crisis levels,” particularly in elementary schools, individual student attendance isn’t measured at the state level. California is one of four states that doesn’t collect individual attendance records. Because this isn’t tracked, many school districts don’t compile the data either. Instead, the California Department of Education records truancy rates, a less detailed measure that doesn’t capture the true extent of student absenteeism.

Truancy rates don’t distinguish between a student who has missed three days, or 30.

Harris recommended that school districts and the state begin tracking individual student attendance. She encouraged school districts to combat absenteeism through the creation of a School Attendance Review Board (SARB), an inter-agency panel that reaches out to the families of truant students, tackling the problems that cause students to miss school.

SARBs have been active in Palm Springs Unified and Coachella Valley Unified for years. Since the causes for absenteeism are widely varied, these boards seek individual solutions for every student.

Intervention can be as simple as helping an overwhelmed parent with a defiant child, or establishing a bedtime to ensure the student has enough sleep to be ready for school in the morning. Sometimes sickly students need medicine for an untreated condition, like asthma or diabetes, that has kept them home.

“But the main reason that kids don’t go to school, whether they are a kindergarten or a high school student, is family dysfunction,” said Jane Mills, director of student services for Palm Springs Unified. “In general, our kids that aren’t attending school every day, all day long, are coming from family situations where parents lack the skills, organization and understanding of the importance to get their kids to school every day. That’s really the bottom line.”

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If families don’t cooperate, the SARB can recommend the case to the District Attorney’s Office, but school districts prefer intervention to prosecution.

For example, in Coachella Valley Unified, more than 1,000 families were brought before a SARB hearing last school year. Only six were set for prosecution.

“We know, generally, deep down, all our parents want their kids to go to school,” said David Gibbons, attendance director of Coachella Valley Unified. “Very few don’t and those are the ones that end up going to court, to be honest.”

Desert Sands Unified does not have a SARB, but the district plans to start one this year.

More absences, less academics

Although the price of student absences is widespread and multifaceted, the impact begins exactly where you would expect — in the classroom.

Students who rack up absences are far more likely to fall behind their peers, increasing the odds they eventually will drop out of school, according to education officials and industry experts. Absences hurt students regardless of their age.

When interviewed by The Desert Sun, district administrators said many parents don’t understand what is at stake when elementary-age children are frivolously absent.

“Your kindergartner missing three days of class because they went to visit their grandmother … that’s not OK,” Mills said. “That is really going to impact your child. You might think, ‘What’s the big deal if you miss a day here? Or a day there?’ But it really does add up.”

Since the late 1980s, numerous studies have shown a strong correlation between absences and the likelihood that a student will drop out of school. Some of the strongest evidence comes from a study released this year by the Everyone Graduates Center in Maryland that quantified the link between elementary absences and teenage dropouts.

According to the center study, if a first-grade student has at least nine absences through the third quarter of the school year, they are twice as likely to drop out when they reach high school. The same is true for third-graders, the study states.

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A separate study, published in 2011 by the Attendance Works Initiative, a national campaign to increase attendance awareness, states that students who are chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade are less likely to be able to read by third grade. And if students can’t read proficiently by third grade, they are four times as likely not to graduate on time, according a 2012 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore charity that funds education research.

Absenteeism has a decidedly negative impact on student performance on standardized tests. According to the AG’s report, elementary schools in California where less than 10 percent of students were truant had an average academic Performance Index score of 821. Schools where at least 40 percent of students were truant had an average score of 756. The state goal is 800 at every school.

The same trend is clear in the Coachella Valley, according to a Desert Sun comparative review of school-by-school truancy rates and test scores over a five-year period. On average, a desert school where less than 10 percent of students are truant would average an API score of 785. Desert schools where at least 40 percent of students are truant have an average API score of 722.

In all three school districts, the highest-testing elementary schools — George Washington Charter, Cielo Vista Charter and Saul Martinez Elementary School — record some of the lowest truancy rates. The lowest-testing schools, which are generally alternative high schools, record the highest truancy rates.

This correlation could be the result of “classroom churn,” according to a 2011 study by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. The nonprofit New York advocacy group found that absent students can hold back an entire class — even classmates that do attend school — by leaving teachers “mired in review and remediation.”

Empty seats, empty pockets

In addition to lowering test scores and graduation rates, absenteeism erodes school funding.

California funds local school districts based on a daily attendance figure, collected by counting students in class once or twice a year over two successive school years. Schools are then awarded a set amount of revenue per student, with adjustments for very small schools and students with special needs.

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In the Coachella Valley, widespread absences have cost desert school districts hundreds of dollars per student, totaling millions of dollars per year.

The Desert Sun calculated lost revenue using the same methodology as the attorney general, using data published by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank.

According to these figures, Palm Springs Unified and Desert Sands Unified could have received $8 million to $9 million more, per year, if their students had perfect attendance. Coachella Valley Unified, a smaller school district, would have received about $5 million more with perfect attendance.

Perfect attendance is an unrealistic expectation, but if these districts were to cut their truancy and chronic absenteeism even a little, the savings could be significant.

For example, Desert Sands Unified loses about $42 each time a child is absent, said Rutherford, the superintendent. If every Desert Sands student reduced their absences by one day, the state would owe the district more than $1 million in additional funding each year.

That’s more than enough money to hire 15 teachers. One million dollars could buy Chromebooks, the district’s digital device of choice, for more than 3,500 students.

As a whole, California schools lost $1.4 billion due to absences during the 2010-2011 school year, according to the AG’s report. Riverside County schools lost about $112 million.

The financial losses extend beyond just schools.

Since students with low attendance are much more likely to drop out of high school, they are far more likely to become a “drain on society,” contributing little to economic growth while demanding more government spending, the AG’s report states. Dropouts are more likely to need welfare or to become juvenile criminals.

In 2007, the California Dropout Research Project estimated that high school dropouts cost the state about $46.4 billion per year in reduced taxable earnings, public-assistance costs and criminal damages.

From truants to dropouts to criminals

Because truancy and absenteeism are likely to lead a student to drop out of school, they also are more likely to lead the student to crime.

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Both the Department of Justice and the Department of Education consider truancy an early warning sign of juvenile delinquency. Indio, a city with a student population of nearly 16,000, the largest in the Coachella Valley, is collaborating on a potentially ground-breaking study of the links between juvenile crime and truancy.

In 2010, the Indio Police Department used a $210,000 federal grant to compare truancy and property crimes. The city had seen a surprising spike in daytime burglaries and police suspected truant students were to blame.

“But we needed to back it up with data,” added Police Chief Richard Twiss.

The department is partnering with Robert Nash Parker, a University of California, Riverside sociology professor who specializes in criminology. Parker and the department compared 10 years of truancy rates and crime data, creating a computer model that predicted burglary based on student attendance.

Generally, if truancy rates increase, Indio police can expect a rising rate of property crimes in that area within a year or two. That year-long window allows police to predict crime trends before they occur, then intervene by helping truants before they become criminals.

“Now that we have the data, we know what the problem is,” Guitron said. “We need to partner with the school districts. We need to teach kids that they need to stay in school. And we need to tell the business community and the residents, when they see kids that need to be in school, like if they’re playing down the street at 10 in the morning, that we will look into that.”

This year, the Indio Police Department launched the second phase of its initiative, concentrating efforts on a truancy-burglary “hot spot” identified by the computer model. The department launched community-outreach programs, designed to help overwhelmed parents, and truancy patrols. A few times a week, these patrols comb neighborhoods near schools, searching specifically for absent students. The patrols communicate with officers embedded at each high school, getting daily information on how many students are missing from class.

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The truancy initiative is still new, but results have begun to surface. Compared to last year, Indio recorded a 12-percent drop in property crime between January and October. There is not enough data to verify how much of this drop can be attributed to the truancy initiative, but it is a noteworthy dip, Twiss said.

Truants and dropouts are far more likely to become the victims of crime than the general population. According to studies from Baltimore, San Francisco and San Bernardino County, most violent crime victims are high school dropouts. The pattern can be reversed, too.

“An increase of graduation rates by 10 percentage points would result in a 20 percent drop in violent crime, and prevent 500 murders and more than 20,000 aggravated assaults per year in California,” the AG’s report contends.

Researchers who prepared the report for Attorney General Harris borrowed that estimate from a 2007 study produced by Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a national nonprofit with members from the criminal justice system and anti-violence groups.

The Fight Crime study, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation among other organizations, took this prediction even further, estimating that a 10-percent bump in graduation rates would prevent 22 homicides and 1,100 aggravated assaults in Riverside County alone. The Desert Sun was unable to independently confirm this estimate because it was based on Department of Justice data from 2005, which was not immediately available.

Turning it around

While absenteeism puts children at risk of struggling in school and succumbing to crime, not every truant is destined to become a dropout, a burglar or a victim.

Some, like Tiffany Merritt, the rebellious West Shores student who had refused to go to kindergarten, can be rescued by a guiding hand and a lot of review. During the second half of her sophomore year, Merritt transferred to La Familia Continuation High, a school that works with at-risk kids on the verge of dropping out. She was inspired by her older brother, Thomas, who had returned to the classroom to get his GED.

At La Familia, Merritt began to study hard for the first time in years. Only then did she realize what she had been missing. After years of skipping school, her grasp of math, science and language was patchy and disjointed.

Two years after transferring to La Familia, Merritt graduated, recording perfect attendance in her senior year. Today, she is a student at College of the Desert, considering a career as a teacher.

But even now, Merritt is baffled by basic mathematics, a scar left by years as a truant.

“I still kind of feel like that, sometimes, like I don’t want to try because I’m so far behind,” Merritt said “A lot of people can’t understand why a 20-year-old can’t multiply. It is because I wasn’t there when we learned it.”

Education Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached at (760) 778-4642, or Brett.Kelman@thedesertsun.com or on Twitter @tdsBrettKelman. Online producer Robert Hopwood (@RobHopwood) contributed to this report.